Canyons and Plains
The Texas Landscape and My Work
The physical landscapes of the Texas Panhandle and Southern Plains have had a profound influence on my work. Growing up in these vast, open spaces shaped not only my perception of scale and movement but also my approach to abstraction.
One of the most significant places from my childhood is Palo Duro Canyon, just outside my hometown of Amarillo. It was a frequent destination for my family—a place where we spent hours wandering the trails, marveling at the canyon walls and their towering hoodoos, and playing in the iron rich Red River that snakes along the canyon floor. While my work is not a direct representation of this place, the marks I make often echo the memories I carry from it.
What has always struck me about Palo Duro is the way its layered walls serve as a record of time—millions of years of geologic and environmental shifts, each striation holding evidence of a history shaped by wind and water. As a child, I took it for granted. As an artist, I now recognize it as a kind of visual archive, a natural abstraction of time and transformation.
Equally influential, though in a different way, are the cultivated fields and flat expanses of the Southern Plains around Lubbock, where I lived as a teenager and young adult. The furrowed rows of crops, the way they stretch toward the horizon, and the rhythmic patterns they form as they weave around natural and man-made obstacles—all of these visual elements stayed with me. There’s something meditative in those lines, like the careful raking of a Zen garden, revealing pathways of movement and stillness.
These landscapes—the canyon’s raw, eroded grandeur and the structured repetition of the fields—continue to inform my approach to abstraction. They are not subjects in a literal sense, but they exist in the gestures, layers, and rhythms of my work, embedded in the way I think about space, time, and mark-making. Looking back, I see now what a gift it was to grow up in such a place—one that shaped not only my sense of home but also my visual language as an artist.